A property’s fair market value is important not just for sale purposes, but also to determine your home’s equity and investment strength. If you plan to sell, refinance or borrow against your home or its equity, you’ll need to determine it’s fair market value first.

Many factors contribute to the fair market value of a home, including the design and condition of the building itself (or buildings), lot size and setting, surrounding properties, recently sold homes and the market rates on any given date.

Online estimators, like those offered by Zillow and Redfin are a convenient place to start in researching your home’s value. Their accuracy, however, is limited by the data available to them. The algorithms used by their Automated Valuation Models, or AVMs, are proprietary, but it’s apparent that they factor hundreds of attributes and variables about properties and neighborhoods in addition to the number of clicks on a given listing. They have no way of factoring the condition of your home or its unique attributes, from natural light utilization to floor plan design to tree and landscape quality and setting. A local professional with in-depth knowledge of your market, after personally assessing your home, is still your most accurate option for determining your home’s market value.

The selection of a listing price is a critical part of your marketing plan, since your home will be viewed online more in the first few weeks than at any other time. Please provide us with your contact info, we’ll be glad to visit with you and prepare a current comparative market analysis for you.